BlackBerry Posts $965 Million Quarterly Loss

BlackBerry today announced its second quarter financial results, and they are exactly as bad as financial analysts expected. The company posted a $965 million loss, including $72 million in restructuring costs. The losses came on revenue of just $1.57 billion – down nearly 49%% from just the previous quarter.

In addition to its losses, BlackBerry has started to whittle down its cash reserves. This latest report shows that the company now has $2.6 billion in cash and equivalents, which means the company spent around $500 million since its last quarter, in which its cash reserves totaled nearly $3.1 billion.

“We are very disappointed with our operational and financial results this quarter and have announced a series of major changes to address the competitive hardware environment and our cost structure,” said Thorsten Heins, CEO of BlackBerry. “While our company goes through the necessary changes to create the best business model for our hardware business, we continue to see confidence from our customers through the increasing penetration of BES 10, where we now have more than 25,000 commercial and test servers installed to date, up from 19,000 in July 2013. We understand how some of the activities we are going through create uncertainty, but we remain a financially strong company with $2.6 billion in cash and no debt. We are focused on our targeted markets, and are committed to completing our transition quickly in order to establish a more focused and efficient company.”

The transition Heins refers to is a buyout offer for the company announced last week. Under the terms of the agreement, an investment consortium headed by FairFax Financial Holdings will acquire BlackBerry for $4.6 billion. The deal is on hold while FairFax conducts due diligence, and BlackBerry is free to court other offers. In the meantime, BlackBerry will be laying off even more employees and while attempting to re-focus on its enterprise offerings.